WordPress 3.8 code name “Parker”

Two days ago, WordPress 3.8 “Parker” was released. Aside many features, WordPress 3.8 has gotten a facelift which brings a fresh new look to the entire admin dashboard. Gone are overbearing gradients and dozens of shades of grey — bring on a bigger, bolder, more colourful design!

Modern aesthetic

The new WordPress 3.8 dashboard has a fresh, uncluttered design that embraces clarity and simplicity. This new design is based on the themes the MP6 plugin offered back in the day. If you just got bored with the default design of your dashboard, than MP6 WordPress plugin did change that. Now the 3.8 version has the MP6 features build in so you can enjoy a new cleaner and more stylish dashboard.

Clean typography

The new WordPress version uses the Open Sans typeface which provides simple, friendly text that is optimised for both desktop and mobile viewing. It’s even open source, just like WordPress.

Now it’s much more pleasant to spend time in your dashboard, thanks to this new version of WordPress 3.8. I find this new design more eye friendly than before. After upgrading from the previous version I had a “technical problem” with the new design. The fonts looked wired like instead of the clean Open Sans typeface there were something disturbing, like the fonts were condensed.

Wired condesed font

The Solution for this mess

It did turned out that I had install on my system (OS X) version 10.9 Open Sans and Open Sans Condensed and there for, the fonts I had installed were taking over overwriting the default WordPress font. If this is your case, please make sure you will disable those 2 fonts – it’s not necessary to delete them – using Font Book. If you are on Windows machine you can try to delete the fonts from your Fonts folder in Control Panel (this is not tested). In the end you will end up with a beautiful dashboard.